Danielle DuBoise and Whitney Tingle back when they delivered their Sakara diet on bycicles. (Photo: Instagram)

Whitney Tingle and Danielle Duboise have never walked in a Victoria’s Secret fashion show, but the still have a lot in common with the brand’s top models. Many of them follow their plant-based Sakara Life diet. It treats food like medicine.

In fact, Tingle swears their diet was a key to her victory over cystic ache, something she battled for a decade of her life.

“I literally tried everything from acupuncture to Accutane and everything in-between,” she tells InStyle magazine. “All the different lights, lasers, creams, I tried it. None of it would work.”

Danielle DuBoise had her own struggle with body image.

“I have this memory of going to Costco with my mom when I was probably nine years old, and trying to hide diet pills in her cart. But, you know, it’s Costco, so you can only buy like 40,000 pills,” she says.

“I turned to dieting and I tried every single diet. What that taught me was that food was the enemy,” she explains.

She finally took a different tack at a retreat in Southern Arizona. She decided to study nutrition instead of going to med school.

“I really wanted to heal my own relationship to food and really understand this idea of what ‘food is medicine’ meant,” she says.

Whitney and Danielle were best friends in Sedona, Calif., before going their own way. But they met up again in New York City years later and began cooking meals for themselves based on what Tingle calls “Pillars of Nutrition.”

“After about two weeks, we saw such a transformation that we knew we wanted to make it our mission to help other people feel this transformation,” she says.

They began by focusing on eating plenty of organic, nutrient-dense greens and veggies, healthy fats. The adamantly refused to count calories. They made breakfast, lunch, and dinner for one another. In 2012, they started cooking meals for their friends, as well, and delivered the food on their bikes.

After Oprah praised their diet, it took off. They quadrupled their clientele in 2018 alone and that’s saying a lot, since the diet program costs $109 a day.

“There were so many other people out there that wanted and needed this. For me, that’s when I realized we had a business. When Gywneth Paltrow is saying this is a business. Oprah putting us on her Supersoul 100 and saying these girls are on to something.”

“Your gut is like an ecosystem. You have to keep that ecosystem in harmony,” says Whitney.

“One thing we learned in our training was that you have to eat your water. Not just drink your water. Making sure you’re getting water-rich produce,” says Danielle.

We have these trace minerals called our Beauty Water Concentrate and our Detox Water Concentrate, so those really help your cells soak up more hydration over time. In terms of routines, we definitely think about what we put inside our bodies first, but I tend to use a lot of oils. I love Vitner’s Daughter. I love Tata Harper I love True Botanicals. Things that feel like they’re made of plants.

Whitney also swears by hemp seeds. “It’s a really great way to get extra nutrients into any type of dish. They’re very neutral in flavor. You can put them in smoothies, you can put them on salads, you can put them in soups. They have healthy fats in them. They gave good plant protein in them.”

The company offers a 10-day “Reset Kit” that helps change your eating habits. It comes with a guidebook on their nutritional philosophy and different levels of recipes – quick and easy, and also more complex.

About The Author

Celebrity Health & Fitness

Keith Girard is Editor and Publisher of Celebrity Health & Fitness, a New York City lifestyle Web magazine devoted to health, fitness, diet, beauty and relationships. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of Billboard magazine and a reporter for the Washington Post among other media positions.